Stem cells are naturally used by the human body to facilitate healing damaged tissues. When a human body is injured, stem cells travel to an injured site and transform themselves into the type of cells damaged to substitute for the damaged cells. Stem cells are able to renew themselves through mitotic cell division and to differentiate into a diverse range of specialized cell types. Overall, stem cells do a good job to heal most damage. Unfortunately, for heart disease cases, stem cells do not completely repair damaged heart tissue. Therefore, stem cell therapy for heart disease is performed in hospitals.
Stem cell therapy for heart disease is a relatively new procedure that is commonly carried out in an angiography x-ray laboratory. A physician typically uses a known angiography system in stem cell therapy. In known systems, a physician performs fluoroscopy to find a damaged heart tissue site of a patient and injects stem cells at the site. The location of the site of stem cell injection is marked on a film that is manually placed on top of an x-ray monitor. This film is used to record the location of the stem cell treatment location. It is used in a follow-up visit to check treatment results.
In a follow-up visit, the film that was previously used to record the stem cell injection site is placed on top of a display monitor showing a current image of the stem cell injection site to evaluate the therapy result. This is a cumbersome and error-prone procedure that is vulnerable to misalignment of the film and misidentification of a site in the current image.
As such, there is a need for an improved framework that addresses these deficiencies and related problems.